{"id":732,"date":"2013-01-22T15:19:35","date_gmt":"2013-01-22T23:19:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=732"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:28","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:28","slug":"book-reveiw-my-secret-garden-by-alan-titchmarsh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/book-reveiw-my-secret-garden-by-alan-titchmarsh\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Reveiw: My Secret Garden by Alan Titchmarsh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alan Titchmarsh is quintessentially English, from his last name to his loves\u2014gardening, dogs, country life and the Queen.\u00a0 Best known to Americans from the imported gardening makeover series, Ground Force<\/em>, Titchmarsh is a celebrity in Britain.\u00a0 He hosts the BBC\u2019s round the clock coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show every year, has written numerous garden books, hosted several garden TV series and undertaken various commercial projects, including designing and endorsing a line of garden tools for a retail chain.\u00a0 He is, in a word, ubiquitous.<\/p>\n

The newest Titchmarsh book is My Secret Garden <\/em>(BBC Books, 2012).\u00a0 I don\u2019t have all of his books, but this one, which portrays his personal plot in words and gorgeous photographs by Jonathan Buckley, sounded interesting.<\/p>\n

From 1996-2002, Titchmarsh was the host of Gardener\u2019s World<\/em>, a venerable BBC gardening show.\u00a0 In a genteel form of reality television, the program was filmed in his own two-acre garden, Barleywood, with new weekly episodes airing from February through November each year. \u00a0This meant that his wife, Alison, had to put up with camera crews on the doorstep for six years.\u00a0 It is not surprising that when the couple moved to their current Georgian house and grounds ten years ago, Titchmarsh promised Alison that the garden would be private.\u00a0 Not only would the beds and borders never show up on the BBC, but they would not even open for the British National Garden Scheme\u2019s Garden Open Days.<\/p>\n

But Alan Titchmarsh is Alan Titchmarsh and he eventually succumbed to the urge to publicize the new plot.\u00a0 The result is My Secret Garden<\/em>, which is a great mid-winter read for gardeners.<\/p>\n

Like many gardening books, My Secret Garden<\/em> is broken out by seasons, starting with spring.\u00a0 There are plenty of luscious close-ups of flowers, including one of hellebores that look better than any hellebores I will ever grow.\u00a0 They are, of course, underplanted with spring-blooming cyclamens, also more numerous and lovely than any I will nurture with my paltry American green thumbs.\u00a0 Still, the inspiration inspired by the pictures and eminently readable text overwhelms my sense of inherent horticultural inferiority.<\/p>\n

Titchmarsh began his professional gardening life at fifteen, as an apprentice gardener for the local municipality.\u00a0 He admits that this background gave him a passion for order and neatness in the landscape.\u00a0 He makes great use of clipped shrubbery to provide structure, defining garden areas with all kinds of boxwood and yew trimmed into cones, balls, lollipops and even topiary birds.\u00a0 To counterbalance all that formality and discipline, the planting schemes enclosed and defined by that wealth of shrubbery are much more loose and open.\u00a0 Drifts of all kinds of plants predominate, as Titchmarsh cleaves to the old garden wisdom of planting in odd number groups\u2014three, five or seven of a particular species or variety.<\/p>\n

He confesses to a fondness for well-loved, tried and true plants.\u00a0 The pictures bear this out, with lots of roses, alliums, agapanthus and delphiniums.\u00a0 Titchmarsh admits that he goes to great lengths to keep slugs from devouring the latter, but persists in growing them anyway.\u00a0 Useful tips are frequent\u2014like underplanting the delphiniums with hardy geraniums to camouflage the delphiniums\u2019 ugly \u201clegs\u201d.<\/p>\n

As you might expect, the Titchmarsh establishment has outbuildings, including a summer house and a greenhouse\/conservatory.\u00a0 It also has sculpture sprinkled throughout the planting scheme, but the art is not pretentiously described or displayed and many of the pieces are reproductions of famous originals.\u00a0 Titchmarsh is, after all, a well-paid British star, not a fabulously wealthy American one.<\/p>\n

What appeals about My Secret Garden<\/em> is Alan Titchmarsh\u2019s love of the creativity of gardening.\u00a0 He is clearly fond of color, open spaces, reliable plants and an artful mixture of order and chaos.\u00a0 He is an organic gardener and stresses that he is a plantsman who designs rather than the other way around.\u00a0 In the introduction he freely admits that he has help in maintaining his lovely garden spread, thanking his gardener, handyman, tree surgeon and lawn mowing helper.<\/p>\n

Photographer Jonathan Buckley is an artist with a camera and even if you don\u2019t read a word of the text, the pictures alone are worth the price of the book.\u00a0 Unlike other books of this type, there are no \u201cbefore and after\u201d pictures, only \u201cafter\u201d.\u00a0 Titchmarsh frequently describes the process by which he transformed his garden over the past decade, but its beginnings are left to the readers\u2019 imaginations.<\/p>\n

I am sure that Alan Titchmarsh\u2019s agent and publisher encouraged him to create a book about his \u201cnew\u201d garden and he admits to missing the audience element that he had while hosting Gardener\u2019s World.<\/em>\u00a0 In the end though, I believe him when he sums up his ultimate motivation\u2014\u201c\u2026the experience is meant to be shared; so are the gardens.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alan Titchmarsh is quintessentially English, from his last name to his loves\u2014gardening, dogs, country life and the Queen.\u00a0 Best known to Americans from the imported gardening makeover series, Ground Force, Titchmarsh is a celebrity in Britain.\u00a0 He hosts the BBC\u2019s round the clock coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show every year, has written numerous garden … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[504,508,505,507,506],"class_list":["post-732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-alan-titchmarsh","tag-book-reviews","tag-english-gardens","tag-gardening-books","tag-seasonal-gardening"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":733,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions\/733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}